Last night I was catching up on my magazine reading with the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly when I came across the most bizarre article I've read in a long long time. The piece was called, "A New Way to Be Mad." At first I skipped it, thinking it described some weird discussion of anger. Instead, when I came across it the second time, I discoverd it was an even more weird discussion of apotemnophilia; the desire that some people have to live their lives as amputees. Here's the opening paragraph:
In January of this year British newspapers began running articles about Robert Smith, a surgeon at Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary, in Scotland. Smith had amputated the legs of two patients at their request, and he was planning to carry out a third amputation when the trust that runs his hospital stopped him. These patients were not physically sick. Their legs did not need to be amputated for any medical reason. Nor were they incompetent, according to the psychiatrists who examined them. They simply wanted to have their legs cut off. In fact, both the men whose limbs Smith amputated have declared in public interviews how much happier they are, now that they have finally had their legs removed.What's important to me about this article is not the amputation stuff (which did leave my mind spinning in confusion and wonder). Rather, what I found so important about this article is the fact that The Atlantic published it at all.
The long standing trend in journalism is to use market research quite seriously to determine what should hit the presses/airwaves/Web pages that we read/see/enjoy. Focus groups, surveys and gobs of measurement devices are used to determine what we want to see.
For me, however, the most valuable service journalism professionals and media executives can provide is to open my eyes to things I don't know about; things I would never say I want to see. Ask anyone on the street if they'd like to read an article about people who spend their lives yearing to cut off their arm and I think we all know what we'd hear. Time and time again, the articles that I find myself glued to are about topics I would initially claim no interest: The New York Times writing an extended article about people who live in caves in China; NPR broadcasting a piece about the Texas guards working on death row; The Atlantic telling me about apotemnophilia.
Not only is there a value to providing people with news and stories about the subjects of which we are ignorant, there is also a real danger in crafting journalism based on what people say they want to watch. Look at our local television news stations which barely cover city government or local economic growth and instead focus on crime and investigative reports. Look at how the Minneapolis Star Tribune has diminished from a once well respected regional paper to a Gannett-like puff piece in an effort to respond to readers. Look at how the national media covered the presidential election as a personality-based horse race.
I have no quams using technology and market research to help us get the information we want in a timely, efficient manner. But all of us--users and providers of media--should take care to recognize that some of the most profound news of the world is never requested and doesn't easily fit into our pre-conceived desires. The notion that we may all receive our news in customized, online emails and homepages with only the information we've signed up for, seems to me terribly frightening. When my my understanding of the world is based only on the information I believe to be important, than it really isn't much of a world view at all.
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